St. Louis to Omaha

A trip on the Union Pacific College Train Special

General

During July, 1995, the Union Pacific Railroad invited a number of
representatives from various universities to participate in their
College Train Special. I went on the July 19-20 trip, representing
the University of Iowa.

In addition to the overnight trip from St. Louis to Omaha, the trip
also included a tour of the Union Pacific Customer Service department
in the old Missouri Pacific Building in St. Louis, and the Harriman
Dispatching Center and UP Linc Television Center in Omaha.

The Train

The train consisted of 10 passenger cars pulled by two diesel engines.
For a total of 40 passengers, about half UP employees and half university
faculty, this seems a bit generous, but it was an overnight trip, with
the intent that we all have plenty of time to talk and get to know each
other. For those who just want to look at the photos, there is a
photo index with thumbnail sketches.

At the rear of the train was the observation car Idaho; the rear half
of this car is built like an auditorium, facing a large picture window at
the rear. After the train arrived in Council Bluffs, Iowa, I took this
photo of the Idaho. The view from inside
the car is quite nice, as is shown by this
photo; at night, the flood lights under the
picture window are turned on, giving a good view of rails, and there are
`front view mirrors' on each side, so you can see what's coming if you
sit in the rearmost side seats.

There is a metal roller-shutter that can be lowered over the outside of the
Idaho's picture window, and with this shutter down and a projection screen
lowered inside the car, it made an excellent lecture hall for the two hours
of formal presentations made during the trip.

Second from the rear was the diner City of Denver; the dining area was
set up with 4 round tables, as shown in the
photo. The service and the food were excellent,
and except for the more modern photos along the walls, I had the impression
that nothing had changed since the 1940's. In fact, this impression was
wrong -- as built, the car almost certainly had a small 2 and 4-person
rectangular tables under each window. All of the glassware, silver and
china used for the service was etched, embossed or glazed with the UP emblem,
and I don't think any of the food was microwaved, as you may be able to
infer from the
photo of the kitchen.

Third from the rear was the dome lounge Harriman. This is the most
prominent car shown in the
photo I took just before boarding the train in
St. Louis Union Station. The lower level of the car contains a lounge
area, while the dome itself provides a wonderful view in all directions,
as shown in the
photo; this photo also gives a view of the
engines and it hints at some of the abandoned antenna systems from older
generation radios the car has been equipped with over the years. The lump
in the center of the front window of the dome is a digital spedometer;
a similar spedometer was mounted above the rear window of the Idaho.

Ahead of the Harriman were the sleepers Portola, Green River,
Omaha and North Platte. All but the North Platte had
8 compartments, while my itinerary shows the latter with 10 compartments.
My compartment in the Portola was very cramped, as you might have
expected, but it had a telephone, shower and a bathroom, and all in all,
it was just big enough to serve its purpose.

Ahead of the sleepers was the business car Feather River. This
car is a self contained business office, with 3 compartments, a compact
dining room, an even more compact kitchen, and an office space with two
large rear-facing desks. The car has an open platform, as shown in the
photo I took in Council Bluffs. One of the desks
has a cellular phone, while the other has a railroad radio and scanner.
Outside the window by each desk is a mirror giving a view forward along
the train, as shown in the
photo. This is the best photo I got of the engines
that pulled our train.

The crew sleeper Columbia River and a power car headed up the
train. I gather that the Feather River and perhaps the Idaho
carry their own diesel generators, but all of the other cars rely on a
head-end power car for their electricity. The UP power cars are all
apparently converted from old baggage cars.

While I'm presenting photos of the train, I'll stick in a
photo of the other train that was parked in
Council Bluffs when we arrived. This included the Chicago and North Western
car Lake Geneva, evidence of the recent merger between the UP and the
C&NW.

After we left our train, it was scheduled to depart for Cheyenne,
Wyoming and Frontier Days. Each car in the Union Pacific fleet of
passenger cars is apparently used on the order of 200 days a year; they
support excursions, conferences like the one I attended, and business
entertainment for bankers, shippers and major stockholders. The business
car is still occasionally used for its original purpose; for example, on
one of its recent trips, it apparently housed a consultant who was touring
the UP's intermodal facilities, and it moved between stops on the tail end
of various intermodal trains. When not in use, these cars are stored in
an old service facility on the Omaha waterfront.

The UP uses a private passenger station of theirs in Council Bluffs
Iowa for their Omaha terminus. This is listed as the UPRR Fox Park station
in the UP literature I have, but it is also right next to Rock Island
Junction, where the Iowa Interstate Railroad interchanges with the UP.

The Harriman Center

Our tour of the UP concluded with a tour of the Harriman Center. This center
is a marvelous combination of modern and historical architecture. From the
outside, it looks like a half-ruined old brick train shed, and in fact,
it began life in the 19th century as a passenger station and then as a 4-track
freight transfer station, a purpose it continued to serve until the 1960's.
The UP continued to use the building for storage, but it was obviously near
the end of its useful life when they decided to renovate it and use it
for their centralized dispatching operation.

Today, the interior of the building is a light airy space, as shown in the
photo. The original pinned iron arch of the train
shed is preserved, and inside, the office space is very pleasant, with
numerous railroad antiques around the walls. What you see in this photo
is the UP crew scheduling and timekeeping departments.

In the space under their feet, everything is completely different.
The scheduling and timekeeping departments sit on top of a bunker that is
designed to stand the worst that nature could possibly deliver in Omaha;
this is generally described as a tornado throwing a telephone pole end-first
at the structure, and to withstand such a threat requires 18 to 24 inches
(a half-meter) of reinforced concrete.

The bunker houses the Centralized Train Control dispatching center; this is
supported by computers and auxiliary power equipment in a secondary
hardened structure, and the atmosphere inside reminded me of the kind
of thing you'd expect at NORAD headquarters inside Cheyanne Mountain or
perhaps the launch control center at the Cape. One person joked that
you needed to put on video burn lotion to prevent problems with all those
computer displays. Unfortunately, I was out of film, but I cheated and
scanned in the
photo from the cover of the handout binder the UP
gave us. This shows one of about 30 dispatchers at work in front of his
section of the CTC display.

The 15 rear projection wall screens in front of each dispatcher aren't just
for show -- they show the current setting of every signal, the current
location of every train, the current alignment of every switch point, and
the current status of each section of track in his or her territory.
The screens on the table in front of the dispatcher display a list of the
trains currently under that dispatcher's control, the status of each
radio and telephone link available for communication with those trains, and,
for dispatchers who handle interchange of traffic with other railroads, the
state of the tracks `over the border' on the connecting railroad.

The hardware was made by Union Switch and Signal, based on 6 large DEC
computers, 3 operational and 3 standby. One Sunday a month, all the
standby systems are tested, and the center is supposed to have sufficient
fuel and expendables to last 20 days without outside support.

It is important to note that the Harriman Center only handles the problems
of assigning crews to locomotives and running trains between stations on
the railroad. The Customer Service Center in St. Louis handles all matters
involved with actually delivering freight service to customers. This involves
everything from taking orders for service to tracking the locations of
railroad cars, issuing orders for trains to pick up and drop off cars, and
issuing orders for what cars should be shunted into what trains.

Much of the customer service center's interaction with customers is by fax,
and all incoming fax traffic is digitized, so it never prints out on paper.
They do have a bank of fax machines, as a backup, but their current operation
is paperless, hard-to-read faxes are digitally manipulated to improve
readability, and the archive of fax corrispondance is maintained in digital
form.

The UP Railroad uses its big IBM mainframes as database servers support
the customer service operation, with a large network of workstations allowing
the customer service representatives to access the computers. In addition,
each locomotive has an on-board computer that maintains train lists and logs
train orders, largely eliminating paperwork from the moving train.

The UP Railroad Message

So why did the Union Pacific invite a bunch of Computer Science faculty
members on such a trip? The message is simple. As one dispatcher said,
in passing, ``experienced dispatchers are almost as hard to find as good
C++ programmers.'' This dispatcher, incidentally, had worked his way up
to that job from telegrapher, and yet he was aware of how much the UP
railroad depends on programmers.

The UP Railroad is expanding aggressively, as evidenced by their investment
in laying a new track across Nebraska, their purchase of the Chicago and
Northwestern, and their recently announced bid to purchase the Southern
Pacific. Furthermore, as a whole, the railroad industry in the United
states is finally healthy, after 40 years of decline. The UP spent quite
a bit of money and time in order to tell us this, and in order to
emphatically demonstrate how highly tied their entire operation is to
computing. Computer science students should keep these kinds of
opportunities in mind!

One question I have been asked is, has the Union Pacific got some idea of
what they want universities to teach in order to prepare people to work in
the railroad industry? The short answer is, no. They did give all
participants in the trip a copy of John Armstrong's ``The Railroad, What
It Is and What It Does'', but beyond that and a few random suggestions,
there was no unified curricular proposal. They certainly didn't ask for
the development of a railroad engineering curriculum such as is available
in Holland.

I speculate that part of the reason for this is that the younger
UP management employees are mostly from random business school backgrounds,
and this doesn't prepare them to believe that their business has any
specialized educational requirements. In this regard, business schools
today teach a conceit that is quite similar to the conceit traditionally
taught by engineering schools -- that a good engineer can solve any technical
problem, regardless of the engineering specialty involved. These kinds of
conceits are both valuable and dangerous. Having such a conceit makes a
manager or an engineer more likely to try hard to solve a problem, which
makes a solution more likely, but the conceit also makes it more likely that,
when a maniger or engineer gets in over his head, he won't admit it until the
a disaster results.